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King's Research Portal View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by King's Research Portal King’s Research Portal DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1275759 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Roberts, L. (2017). Lyric Audibility: In Public. TEXTUAL PRACTICE, 1-14. DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1275759 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. 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Nov. 2017 Textual Practice ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20 Lyric audibility: In Public Luke Roberts To cite this article: Luke Roberts (2017): Lyric audibility: In Public, Textual Practice, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1275759 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1275759 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 24 May 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 89 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtpr20 Download by: [King's College London] Date: 13 June 2017, At: 04:35 TEXTUAL PRACTICE, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1275759 Lyric audibility: In Public Luke Roberts Department of English, King’s College London, London, UK ABSTRACT This article offers a close reading of the poem ‘In Public’ by the American poet John Wieners (1934–2002), and explores how historical gay experience can be signalled poetically. Drawing on sociological accounts of public sex, I detail an erotics of silence and a concomitant erotics of listening. My commentary seeks to examine and extend the threshold of audibility in lyric poetry, finding meaning in absent words and in the marked suppression of sounds that carry social significance. With reference to the poet’s notebooks, journals, and public readings, I position ‘In Public’ as a key moment in his literary development, written during a crucial phase of the struggle for gay liberation. I suggest that if we listen closely to ‘In Public’ we can hear a passionate lyric resistance to the language of psychiatry and the policing of same-sex desire. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 8 February 2016; Accepted 4 April 2016 KEYWORDS John Wieners; lyric; public sex; Laud Humphreys; Stonewall; New American Poetry; poetry and psychiatry how we love these sounds for/the words they make.1 (Chris Goode) There are words and they govern.2 (John Wieners) Prelude The classic sociological accounts of public sex between men tend to detail an erotics of silence. As Laud Humphreys wrote in his pioneering study, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (1970): Throughout most homosexual encounters in public restrooms, nothing is spoken. One may spend many hours in these buildings and witness dozens of sexual acts without hearing a word. Of fifty encounters on which I made extensive notes, only fifteen included vocal utterances […] Two were encoun- ters in which I sought to ease the strain of legitimizing myself as lookout by saying ‘You go ahead – I’ll watch’.3 CONTACT Luke Roberts [email protected] © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDer- ivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 L. ROBERTS Humphreys, who had worked as a priest in Chicago and was closeted during his research and at the time of its publication, remains a controversial figure. As the passage shows, his position is always at risk of illegitimacy: first among the cruising men, and then within the discipline of social sciences. The line between observation and voyeurism is left unclear in the reconstruction of events. During his fieldwork he had to be convincingly engaged in the general activity of the tearoom, but in his writing he had to maintain the non-involvement proper to the ethnographer. The role he adopted to navigate this dilemma – the ‘watch queen’–is a fraught position of authority. Though by sounding the alarm he will protect participants from the ‘potentially threa- tening and uninitiated intruder’, he will himself intrude, turning the almost silent sexual encounters into a prose bristling with awkward intensity.4 Without wishing to diminish the importance of Tearoom Trade as a work of sociology, I want to insist on its literary qualities. Using the language of scientific observation, Humphreys creates his own vocabulary to describe sex acts and the types of communication that facilitate them. As watch queen he situates himself in impossible arrangements, his view of the toilet, with its mirrors and surfaces, both omniscient and claustrophobic. The reader’s sense of time and duration is suspended. At times he reads like a choreographer. In hardback the English edition looks like a late modernist novel, the dust jacket adorned with black and white graphics based on restroom signs. The paperback features a sepia photograph bordered with garish pink. It could be mistaken for a book of poetry. Part of the importance of Humphreys’ study comes from the conclusions he draws about the men who visit tearooms. They fit no ‘deviant’ character type: many were married with children, god-fearing respectable community members. In order to establish these details he had to go to extraordinary lengths, and it is here that his methodology sounds most like a work of fiction. Humphreys traced the registration plates of vehicles he saw outside the park restrooms, and then a year later, having disguised his appearance, visited his subjects at home in order to interview them under the pretence of a random health survey. This process is meticulously recorded in the latter part of the book, and provided the excuse for scandal. Early notices of his research drew ire from the Washington Post, and his institutional pos- ition at Washington University was threatened, leaving the sociology depart- ment in uproar. According to legend, Humphreys got into a physical fight with Professor Alvin Gouldner, who opposed the awarding of his doctorate. Even after his degree was conferred, others in the administration argued that Humphreys, by aiding and abetting fellatio, had committed a felony, and his PhD should be revoked. The eventual settlement stipulated that the research had to remain unpublished for at least two years.5 This delay meant that Tearoom Trade appeared only months after the Stonewall uprising. In the era of militant Gay Liberation – which formed TEXTUAL PRACTICE 3 the subject of Humphreys’ only other book, Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation – studies of queer sex cultures proliferated.6 For every location where public sex takes place there are distinct conventions. More- over, there are different types of ‘public’ spaces. How does a commercial venue – a bookshop or a club – differ from a park? How is sexuality con- ditioned by the available environment? How does the law respond to trans- gressions of heteronormative public conduct? But it is not the purpose of this essay to intervene in the contestation of public sex and the question of legal discourse, political action, and collective memory.7 The truth is that like any erotics, the erotics of silence is overdetermined. What it comprises is the act of listening, and listening prioritised until what is inaudible is made audible. At the close of the 1970s, Edward Delph’s The Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters (1978) cele- brated what he called ‘erotic oases’ and ‘publiceroticwork’.Hisaccountof sex in parks, bars, baths, cinemas, and the subway system is less academi- cally rigorous than Tearoom Trade, less inhibited, more interested in details: Subway toilets are controlled by a coin-locked door. The lock, and the noise the coins make when deposited, serve as audible warning devices. The tingle near the door sends players into sudden flurries of activity to recover conventional roles.8 In a move typical of his style, he goes on to make the important point that the necessity of paying to access this space excludes some men from entering. But he does so with reference to ‘poverty wanderers’ and then assures us that ‘the motivated homosexual always makes sure he has the right change’.
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